


The Revival

by RoseFrederick



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Gen, Near Death, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 22:18:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13668456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseFrederick/pseuds/RoseFrederick
Summary: Technology made by man has a long history of growing by leaps and bounds – and being halted or reversed by catastrophic setbacks caused by things for which man hadn't planned.  When settlers flew out on theRevivalto colonize a new world, no one planned on a vampire bringing it all to ruin.  Least of all the vampire himself.





	The Revival

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aponyforyourthroney](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aponyforyourthroney/gifts).



It was cold, dark, and lonely in the vast space between the stars. Yes, that was a cliché, but it came to be so because of the underlying truth of it. Ages ago, the passengers of the _Revival_ had boarded the ship expecting to blissfully skip past that yawning nothing in a safe state of sleep, awakening only once the ship reached its destination at the new colony world designated for them. The smoothness of their journey was to be assured by a well-tested AI steering the ship and troubleshooting any hazards that might happen along the way.

What neither the builders of the ship nor Ives had any way of knowing was that the cryosleep technology meant to keep all the passengers in stasis did not work on vampire physiology. Or more to the point, it only worked long enough for him to be loaded on with four hundred and ninety nine other vulnerable passengers and wake just five short years into the expected two hundred year journey, utterly ravenous. 

The only other conscious entity aboard was the sentient ship _Revival_ itself. Although the memories are faint now, Ives can remember that at first, the ship had cheerfully tried to help him. It had scanned and run several diagnostics on him and his sleep pod to try and make adjustments. There had been several apologies for “the dreadful inconvenience” before the ship had offered him access to crew quarters – actual amenities set aside for those meant to pilot the ship for the last year or so as they moved into orbit around their new home - while he waited. He can remember that exact phrasing even now, thousands of years later - “dreadful inconvenience” - because it had struck him as so painfully inadequate even then, before he knew what was to come.

The ship had been confounded by his biology, and even more so that no one had taken notice of his differences during the passenger loading process (something he'd paid handsomely to avoid, as a matter of fact). Yet _Revival_ had been cheerfully willing to try and re-calibrate the controls to put him back to sleep, so he'd held a tight rein on his hunger and allowed himself to hope the ship knew what it was doing. 

Two and a half years later, exactly half the original time, he'd come back to awareness with his fangs sunk into the neck of a fellow passenger. As his other senses had tuned in, he'd slowly recognized the AI's synthesized voice over the ship's comm system. It had been purposefully programmed not to ever use vocal tones of distress, yet he could still hear the panic in its calmly endless repetition, “… please desist, please desist, please desist …”

He'd taken stock to find that the man he'd been feeding on had been at the end of a line of four busted pods, each containing the drained husk of a previous occupant. The cryo drugs in their blood would leave a weird taste in his mouth for days, which he remembers thinking was awful. At least he'd felt that way that first time. Eventually he'd gotten used to it. 

There had been no denying at that point his situation was dire. He wasn't willing to die after all the long years he'd been alive, and that meant some change in course was called for. Even if he had been indifferent to the idea of eating all of the other passengers, he'd run out well before the ship ever got close to its destination. 

While he had contemplated his options, he'd pointedly tuned out the ship, intermittently repeating various parts of the penal code from the colony's agreed upon charter. “Section 1.3-Q, interference with another's human cryochamber in transit is subject to the following penalties … Section 10.2-E, the unlawful killing of a human is subject to the following penalties … Under Section 10.35-A, consumption of human body materials is subject to the following penalties …”

It was a little less easy to ignore how the ship had next attempted to lock him into the crew quarters, away from the rest of the sleeping passengers. Especially since the lockdown also kept him out of the bridge and unable to access the main computers, the two resources he'd needed to have any chance to find somewhere to redirect the ship and perhaps save some of the passengers in addition to himself. He had tried in vain to argue this, he felt, very reasonable point with the ship's AI, but _Revival_ had been convinced it was just a trick. Ultimately it had taken about a month before he'd been desperately hungry enough to rip the doors open to get into the passenger berths again. After that, the ship seemed to see no further point in trying to disallow him from the bridge. 

After spending several hours reviewing the information in the computers about the nearby stellar cartography, he'd come to the conclusion his only real option was to reverse course and send the ship back to their point of origin. Ives had no particular familiarity with astronomy, and had been unhappy to realize that the long stretch of space between their homeworld and their destination was really quite empty of survivable planets. He'd not been looking forward to trying to orchestrate his escape in an emergency shuttle upon return to their home system and all the subsequent complicated machinations establishing a new identity would entail, but it had been the only real option to ensure the survival of anyone on the _Revival_.

It had been as good of a plan as was possible to make, he'd thought. In the handful of years that had followed, he'd first tried to feed without killing. Unfortunately, the sleepers did not replenish their blood to any meaningful degree, even given years to do so. In the end, he had chosen to wait as long as he dared between feedings to try and preserve as many of the lives of the passengers as he could. He didn't even hold it against the ship when it had continued to lecture him with legal codes every time. 

Unfortunately, reality had not lived up to the promise of his plan. Returning to their home system had revealed a series of irradiated hunks of unlivable rock where their home planet and most of its sister settlements had been. For all that there had been many good reasons so many people had been willing to launch off into the dead nothingness of space, nothing like this had been foreseen. Only one planet of four previously inhabited in the system had shown any signs of life, and the ship was warned away by an automated voice and a missile launch when he'd tried to have the ship approach it. _Revival_ barely lurches them out of the line of fire in time to prevent severe damage to the hull, and the ship had warned him it would have to override if he tried a second approach.

He'd admitted defeat and scoured the database again, using their home system as a new starting point to look for any reasonable options of alternate destinations. To his despair, there had been nothing, and Ives had turned his concentration towards other possibilities for survival. Waking the other passengers wasn't an option. While he could feed on them without killing if they were animate, it would be too hard to hide such activity. Even if he could risk that, the ship was simply not equipped with the resources to support the population of the sleeper pods awake for any length of time. When he had eventually outlined the problem to _Revival_ in desperation, the ship had no suggestions to give either. 

Even his half-formed thought to stay in the system and wait out whoever was on the planet below was thwarted when _Revival_ detected a group of unfamiliar spaceships coming into the system. The ship had concealed their presence using interference from various objects in the system until it could be pointed outward toward an area of space previously unexplored by their people. Ives told the ship to take that course and prepared himself to tune out the objections of the ship's AI for a long time to come. It ultimately took him a long time to eat his way through all of the passengers, but the space between the stars is limitless in a way his food supply was not. 

At one point, he'd even tried waking up just a couple of them together, hoping the ship could sustain them and they in turn could sustain him. It hadn't worked; he'd nearly lost his head and therefore his life when they'd turned on him in under six months. He hadn't dared repeat the experiment again. Not just from the direct risk, but from the way the lack of other living beings echoed in the empty corridors of the ship for years afterward. It took at least a decade to forget what they looked like, and half a century to forget their names. He had known he couldn't risk getting attached after the first failed attempt. 

As the time had passed, ever so slowly, he had done his best to spread his feedings out as thinly as he could manage. Once he'd been forced to let go of the possibility of saving anyone, he had worked hard to no longer think of the passengers as people. It had gotten easier over time for him. He suspected the same was true for the ship, whose protests became more and more token as the years went by. 

By the time he'd gotten down to the last fifty remaining passengers left, he'd started to face the idea of running out of food with as much resigned curiosity as trepidation. Would he eventually die of starvation? No vampire he'd ever heard of had done so. Would he go mad and stay that way forever? Would he kill himself on purpose by tearing through the hull protecting him from the vacuum of space? Perhaps he'd just be so far gone he'd walk right out an airlock purely on accident. Those were the thoughts that had circled in his head as the number of pods with live occupants had dwindled.

The ship had long since given up trying to talk him out of eating its other passengers by that point. Once they were all gone, _Revival_ had even listened with a sympathetic ear to his concerns and speculations. Ives wasn't sure if he had been more dismayed or reassured by the ship informing him it was charged to ensure his safety and could at least keep him from unintentionally opening any airlocks.

He did go mad for a while, entirely losing track of time. From hunger, from despair, from being alone – he had no idea which. He was surprised to find that the state did not last forever, coming back to himself to find his body slowly coming to a stop like an old wind-up toy. His skin shrank down and desiccated. It became harder and harder to move any of his joints. Eventually, he was in little better shape than the last remaining bodies of the passengers, but unlike them, he hadn't been released into death. Ives was still trapped in his withered shell, alive. 

Through it all, the ship had observed his decline. It had conversed with him as he was no longer able to do anything but speak. _Revival_ had continued to talk to him long after he'd been able to respond in turn. Telling him about things that were passing by in the dark emptiness of space outside, relating various curiosities recorded in the ship's exhaustive data banks. 

Indeterminate time passes. A lot of it he is thankfully insensate for, or he'd go even madder than the constant gnawing of hunger underlying his every conscious thought already makes him feel. Every time he is aware, though, he hears the steady voice of _Revival_ , talking to him.

Eventually, he wakes to unfamiliar voices. They aren't speaking any language he knows, and he's sure he's long since lost the ability to open his eyes – if he even still has anything worth calling eyes. Yet when one of the voices get close enough, somehow his body powers itself up just enough to lunge. 

When he's torn his way through the crew of the exploratory vessel that had found the _Revival_ alone and apparently dead, feeling and looking more himself, he checks the logs. He'd expected the vessel had ignored warnings from Revival not to board, or had not been able to understand them through a language barrier. Instead, he finds _Revival_ gave no warning, but even after finding a number on the chronometer he can barely comprehend, the ship is clearly still fully functional. 

He can only ask, confused, “Why didn't you warn them away? Or prevent them from locking on?”

“My mandate is to protect my passengers. You are my only remaining passenger.”

The ship then pulls up data from the vessel of their doomed visitors. _Revival_ highlights a map and corresponding schedule for a set of regular shipping lanes nearby.


End file.
